For Professor Beard Pompeii was a city full of gods. There were the numerous gods of the Greek pantheon plus deified emperors. Roman religions had their priests, Cicero was one, but they were civil dignitaries rather than Christian clergy. They had no single sacred text to guide them. ‘The crucial fact’, writes Beard, ‘was that the community’s adherence to religion was demonstrated through acts rather than words ... the act of animal sacrifices was the most important act of all.’ If neglected, the gods would take a terrible revenge, as with the great Pompeian earthquake of AD 67. One of the more attractive features of paganism was that, since gods shared human vices and virtues, they were almost personal friends. But the pagan view of the afterlife in Hades is grim indeed. There is evidence in Pompeii that its citizens found deeper satisfactions in the worship of Egyptian religions. There do not seem to have been Christians in Pompeii but, as Gibbon tells us, they held the trump card: a clear view of the resurrection of the body and life everlasting. For them the saved will rejoice for ever in Abraham’s bosom and the sinners will struggle to survive eternity in the burning lakes of Hell.
The elite tourists of the 18th-century Grand Tour found in Pompeii an aristocratic society and culture which they could understand. At school and university they had been nurtured on a diet of the Greek and Roman classics. Then with the railways came mass tourism. At present over two million tourists visit Pompeii each year. They will have little Latin and Greek, since these are tough disciplines, while soft options like sociology are considered as more relevant to our age. Mary Beard’s scholarship supplies the ignorant with a lively description of Pompeii as a city frozen in time.
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